Word: abstractions
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...hints, to let it be known that it was ready, nay eager, to start talking. Thus the better part of our first year was spent in convincing both the Soviets and our own bureaucracy that we intended to base our negotiations on a calculation of the national interest, not abstract slogans, and on strict reciprocity, not "gestures" or "signals." By the end of 1969 it seemed that the careful fencing was about to end. My talks with Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin-what came to be known as the Channel-had become increasingly active, usually on Soviet initiative. We had succeeded...
...face softens with love, the scene loses all of its initial humor and we see the tragedy of a sexual code which forbids a father from ever knowing his children. Sami Frey's performance catches every nuance of Fernand's complicated nature--from his inability to grasp abstract concepts to his generosity to his amusing kvetchiness about what slobs Alexa and Louis...
...York Pompeians of the '60s, the collectors Robert and Ethel Scull, she complete with sunglasses and Courrèges boots. But as a rule, Segal's figures are not identifiable. They are generalized, spectral presences, muffled in the folds of calcified gauze, their skin roughened with residual abstract-expressionist drips and clots. It hardly matters that the stooped Gerontion in Segal's Hot Dog Stand, 1978, is a cast of the sprightly museum director Martin Friedman; what does count is the peculiar tension between his dark shape and the bright white figure of the waitress, under...
...images; no American sculptor today runs his work closer to theater. The theatricality becomes particularly intense in his painted sculptures, where the coating of figures with primary red, yellow or blue gives them a ferocious visual punch while rendering them, in Segal's words, "more like abstract shafts of color." To take the colors associated with the most rigorous abstractionists of 20th century art - Mondrian and Barnett Newman - and use them in a piece like The Costume Party, begun in 1965, has a perverse aspect...
...much emptiness should come between a silhouette in a bar and the profile of a metal letter, and how to maintain a kind of iconic austerity in an impure medium that could easily become cluttered with props and set dressing. Segal is no formalist, but his sense of the abstract underpinning of sculpture cuts down on what might otherwise have become a tough-but-tender street sentimentality. He is, as the catalogue suggests, a "proletarian mythmaker," though not in a political sense; and no other sculptor working in America today has done more to revive the human figure...